


The Quincentennial Man

by jalendavi_lady



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon - First Anime, Community: fma_fic_contest, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-17
Updated: 2010-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:49:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jalendavi_lady/pseuds/jalendavi_lady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Hohenheim character study, from Episode 44 of the first anime through <i>Conqueror of Shamballa</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quincentennial Man

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the The Gate (open word count) prompt at [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/fma_fic_contest/profile)[**fma_fic_contest**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/fma_fic_contest/) .

It was an after-thought, nearly, when Hohenheim asked Alphonse if he and Edward had ever gone into the closet of his study.

It was after midnight. He was yawning. Alphonse _wasn't_ , but Hohenheim wasn't about to question the boy about that.

He'd been to the Gate enough times to _know_ what that most likely meant.

The feel in the air around his youngest son was not to be thought of, despite the fact Hohenheim knew what that meant better than nearly any human on the entire _continent_.

"No," Alphonse told him. "Mother told us not to when we were first studying alchemy. And after... we just couldn't find the key, and neither of us knew what we might set off if we used alchemy to open it...."

That was a weight off of his soul.

He'd started back when he'd first had an inkling his ability to successfully switch bodies was beginning to fail. Before this body. Before he'd met Tricia Elric.

Truth be told, before she was even born.

(That, more than anything, made him feel _old_. It was hard to imagine now that a world could have ever existed without having known her laugh.)

He'd first learned it watching his grandfather, then from his first look at the Gate, and finally had it confirmed through half a millennia of people-watching - those who understand their ends are near like to leave something behind them.

Children, a government that cares more than the last one, monuments of stone, poems that will never stop being recited, inventions that will change the world, knowledge...

And so Hohenheim of Light, the oldest human he knew of and one of the two humans to have seen the Gate the most - to have paid it the most toll, through their body-switching and the payment when they had created a Philosopher's Stone so long ago - and the only human he knew of to have paid a toll with his own life and survived to tell the tale (thanks to Dante's quick thinking), had begun to _write_ , nearly as soon as he understood that his sins meant he would never live to grow old.

To write every bit of it he could remember, every bit that mattered.

Every bit about the foundations of matter that there was no way this world - he knew well that there were others, so many others - could possibly know for another hundred years or more.

How the sun worked, how the stars formed.

The impact that formed the moon, and all that the sacrificial death of the two worlds that had become one had granted the universe in equivalent exchange.

How life began.

The fundamental attributes of this world, the combination of which made it different from all of the others and therefore made them something of a naming fingerprint.

The secrets of how humans discovered alchemy in the first place, so long ago.

What little even _he_ knew of what really happened at death, and after.

And as he wrote, he had met Tricia. And had children. And decided that, no matter how this body fell apart, he would not take another again.

And neglected both Edward and Alphonse, more than he should have, to keep writing. Always writing.

Until the day he left, suddenly unable to stand decaying in front of their eyes, no matter what reassurances Tricia gave him.

Alphonse jolted him out of the memory. "Father, what was it?"

"Just the memories of an old man. Don't worry about it."

"But if it was important, we shouldn't have..."

"Alphonse, I'm not angry with you two for burning those papers," he insisted. "None of it was anything that someone else won't figure out eventually. And you and your brother are worth far more than anything that was in that closet."

As Hohenheim went to sleep in the tent, he thought, _You probably did the world a favor, Alphonse._

Sometimes paying the toll made you ready for knowledge, and Hohenheim was now sure that the world _needed_ to figure out some things - many things - out for itself. No shortcuts of one man paying the tolls for everyone.

And it hadn't taken visiting the Gate to teach him that.

...

He confronted Dante knowing that he had the technical upper hand.

She had servants, yes.

But she, Hohenheim knew well, was not the sort to have ever learned that all life eventually _must_ end.

She would still fear the end. He had left that behind long ago.

And even before that, well, it only took a look at how they had reacted to Anselm's death to know that they had both always had diverse views of death.

(Along with diverse views of Anselm, period. _And Edward thought **he** was neglected._ )

But he had never expected her to have the capacity by now to open the Gate _at will_ to send anything but herself through.

...

The years in Munich were very nearly the best of his entire life, Hohenheim decided even as the price of food rose beyond anything even he had ever known, taking his two-centuries-long habit of an apple every morning during their proper season (and in Amestris, with alchemy, that season had been all year long) with it.

Nothing could compare to the years with Tricia Elric. Her love. Her laugh. Her acceptance of what she knew of what he was.

Her acceptance that marriage vows, with all their words of partings and devotion, did not fit who Hohenheim of Light _was_.

He knew too much. Too much of love, too much of love fading. Too much of what love _was_ , chemically.

Too much of what was already then happening to him.

But these few years with Edward, having him to talk to, his boy who had already been far beyond his years even as a toddler...

It wasn't equal to the time with Edward's mother, but questions of equal and not-equal didn't do justice to either Elric, nor to the man doing the questioning.

And if Edward had been beyond his young age when Hohenheim had left Risembool, now...

Now the boy had been through the Gate four times, and only once had his passage been anywhere near as selfish as the least Hohenheim had done to take himself there.

They were not equals, would never be equals - _thank whatever Power may be behind all the worlds that are, we will never be equals_ \- but Edward was close enough to be truly intelligent conversation.

They had talked about the things they had seen in the Gate.

They had talked about the things they had both seen but that Edward had not understood, and once the lad had understood such questions would be answered, so long as they were in a place they could not be overheard, the questions had come fast and seemingly endless at night for months, nearly a year.

And they had talked about the things that had been burned in the closet, once Edward had gained enough wisdom to understand the _danger_ they carried in their heads. Hohenheim didn't tell Edward everything, by any means. He had gained wisdom of his own in the decades since he had begun that project.

But he told the younger man the things that mattered, the things worth keeping. He told him what he knew of the world _before_ theirs, before the thousand exchanges that had made humans possible at all. He told him what he knew of their two worlds, the differences, the reasons alchemy wouldn't work in the land they had found themselves in, the ways those reasons might be overcome.

He did not need to tell Edward Elric why all those ways were unthinkable, and the look in the golden eyes told Hohenheim all he needed to know about the depth and character of the younger alchemist's ethics.

Hohenheim had found the thing which would outlast him, and he was content with knowing Edward would have the benefits of Hohenheim's experiences without the mistakes.

And, as Edward began to drift away as young men with a world to explore have a habit of doing, Hohenheim told him of Dante and their boy, and the mistakes of the past.

He never said the name Anselm. It was still too painful - the death, Dante's mistake, and Hohenheim's understanding of what that had meant for the boy.

The horror that sent him away, which was something Edward shared in his own way with his own mistake, perhaps feeling it even more deeply.

And then Edward had left, off to go study rocketry - of all things! - Hohenheim had already warned him that was no way to get home.

 _But_ , he thought with a smile as the young man walked away, _perhaps there are some things that have to be learned from experience._

...

Hohenheim spent the long, pain-filled hours in the dragon's maw calculating.

Not calculating the time he had left. That was beyond his knowledge now, and the simple fact that there was going to be an end to the agony sometime _soon_ was enough for his mind.

Nor was he passing the hours as he once might have, calculating some theory pieced together from glimpses in the Gate.

He was calculating out the time he had already _lived_.

Trying to remember the date when Dante had thrown him into this world. Trying to figure out what day today was. Trying to remember if the date he had left Amestris and the date he had arrived here had matched precisely, or only in season.

Trying to remember, most of all, just what his birthdate so long ago had been.

And then running the numbers through his head, without the benefit of pencil and paper for the figuring.

So it was that when Edward showed up and Hohenheim found himself urging the dragon, Envy - _Anselm!_ \- to take the revenge he had long wished for that which had been done to him, he was able to give his boy, his lasting mark on the worlds, a wry smile, thinking

 _I would have been five hundred tomorrow._

And then he was at the Gate for the last time, the doors swinging open.

Only this time, for the first time, the other side shone as golden as his son's eyes, but with no hint of black to be seen. There was no sign of the terrors the Gate held for the living.

Hohenheim could hear Tricia's voice laughing, and stepped forward, smiling.

He knew she was waiting for him there, his beloved and the target of his deepest devotion, no matter that they had never been wed.

After all, what vow of "'til death do us part" could ever have been appropriate from the lips of an alchemist who knew well that death _reunited_?  



End file.
